


Ashes to Ashes

by SompnolentPoppy



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Dream Sequence, Gen, Pre-Canon, Someone save Gandy from herself, TAZ Big Bang 2018, TAZ dust, poetic descriptions of horrifying nightmares
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 20:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16436594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SompnolentPoppy/pseuds/SompnolentPoppy
Summary: Gandy Dancer is twenty years old and out of her depth. She came to Japan seeking a solution to her crippling fear of death, but in a country under political upheaval and filled with yokai and magicians, she may end up facing more trials than she expected in the land of the rising sun.





	Ashes to Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to be historically accurate for all that Dust avoids naming time and place (the railroad bit is how I placed it in the late 1800s) but let me know if I’ve gotten stuff wrong. Also if I’ve gotten stuff wrong culturally! I’m definitely not an expert on Japanese culture, so let me know if I slip!

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/143876612@N03/30662234207/in/dateposted-public/)

Gandy Dancer is twenty years old and dreaming. She feels the earth quake, smells hot iron, and hears the screams of her parents dying to save the other railroad workers. She stares into the cold front of a train engine car, it’s tooth like griddle gaping and dripping blood. The steam from the locomotive is heavy, winding through the air snakelike and weighing at her lungs. 

She coughs, feels resistance as her body rejects the cloying smog. There is nothing here for her but death. 

Her hands blister, and she looks down to watch the flesh on her arms warp and wither. It cascades to the smoke-smudged dirt like ribbons. Her flesh piling up in stinking heaps of charred black meat.

In one instance she is twenty, the next she is ten again, bawling even as the hot air laps up her tears. She knew what death was, everyone on the railroad knew what death was. How could they not when those tracks covered the bodies of workers starved, beaten, blistered, and cold. They were laying tracks in the desert when her parents died. There, folks mostly perished of disease and heat. Living in the railroad camps, Gandy could smell death in the air like a morning greeting.

For all her familiarity with death, nothing quite beats the smell of burning hair and cooking flesh. It was one thing to hear your parents dying, it was quite another to smell them. Something else even to feel the heat killing them stinging against her own dry skin, and taste the ashy flakes of their flesh even as she tried to avoid breathing the pieces of her parents floating through the air like dark ominous snow.

The dream shifted, Gandy sits amidst a snowstorm of ash, fighting against the wind as grey flakes stick to her skin, strange freckles against her tan cheeks. Pushing against the wall of air, she feels something grab her ankle. A sunken skeletal hand emerges from the ashes beneath her feet and attempts to pull her down. Other sallow hands breach the surface as Gandy tries to pull away, but they grasped at her, and through their papery skin she feels their bones tight around her legs. Inescapable. Down to her waist, Gandy screams helplessly as she claws at the ashes around her, desperately trying to escape the hollow hands that pull her farther down.

The ashes began to fill her mouth, and Gandy wakes.

Some of her hair is in her mouth.

She spits it out. Sweat is beaded on her brow, and soaking the comforter tangled around her legs. Her chest is tight as she breaks into actual wakefulness. She rolls off the futon and onto the cool surface of the tatami mats she was sleeping on, tucks her legs to her chest and clutches them as if enough pressure will erase the vice around her ribs. 

Crying comes to her slowly. There is that deadened feeling as if her brain has stopped all function, but her heart keeps pounding at its breakneck pace. Then the tears, one or two pushing down her face from what feels like a stopped damn. Soon enough she’s sobbing, though she’s learned to be quiet about it. No one cares when she cries anymore, and she’d rather they didn’t see it. So instead she drags ragged breaths in and out, gasping for air or stability.

This is her next fifteen minutes.

Then, when she’s rubbed the salt water against her knees, her eyes stinging but less liable to drip, Gandy breathes deeply and stretches her legs out in front of her. She sits there and feels the knot inside her loosen. It will not come undone, but she passes her days in some form of functional.

Standing now, she moves over to her trunk. She’s in Japan, it’s maybe three or four in the morning, one of those nebulous hours too early to be late, and too late to be early. She had come in on the coast, stepping out into mist and rock and green. It was hard to believe she could find answers about death in a country so full of life, but Tokyo is different from the rural villages she’d seen there. It is a city amidst change, she sees the same modernization that had followed the railroad's wake in the west, bursting through the streets of this foreign city.   

Even with the side-eyes for being a foreigner in the Meiji era, the Tokyo Prefectural Library has made the journey worth it. It had only become a truly effective database of publications in the last few years, but Gandy stays a month in Tokyo just wasting hours navigating the dusty smelling aisles.

It takes her a week to even convince the librarians to allow her in, but the wealth of knowledge beckons and Gandy is nothing if not stubborn. She reads treatises on Dutch and Chinese medical theory, accounts of military campaigns, page after page of intricate calligraphy and poetry. 

Two weeks in she thinks she hit a jackpot. Forty-four volumes in aged blue covers. 

It’s an academic study of the oldest written collection of folk stories in Japan, a historic volume she’d heard of but had little hope for translating, seeing as it had been written in the eighth century, in a far more archaic form of Japanese than Gandy was capable of reading. But here, translated to a more modern form of the language and analyzed by some dead scholar, she could truly learn it.

Gandy immerses herself in the gods and yokai of a history long passed. 

And finds nothing.

Of course, there are plenty of interesting stories of ghosts, and creatures, and magic, but the Kojiki does not hold the answers she seeks. It talks so little of death. A goddess dies, her corpse left to rot and death is confirmed inescapable. This is not what Gandy wants to hear.

In the end, Gandy is forced to admit that the library is a lost cause. Too new a collection, with books too old.

A break comes to her unexpectedly, long past when she’s resigned herself to seek answers elsewhere. Information comes via the older woman living near her. Perhaps she would have found it earlier if she had spent less time in the library or if her spoken Japanese hadn’t been so poor. Basic grammar rules escaped her, and it was only halfway through her first month in Tokyo that she’d truly been able to converse with her. The woman was kind though, helped her blend in better by exchanging the long but light outer robes and trousers she’d worn in Vietnam for the more complex but acceptable kimonos and hakama.

Yamada-san would often invite her over for tea, and the two of them would nurse their cooling beverages as they chatted about folklore and legend. Yamada-san, about fifty years Gandy’s senior, had plenty of stories to tell.

There was the story of the two oni, an account of a local girl swept up in a fox’s wedding, even Yamada-san herself claimed to have once seen a terrible yokai, all shadow and ill-will hiding in the depths of a well. She had little to say that would truly interest a budding magician fixated on death, but Gandy enjoyed the stories all the same.

She pulls her hair back into a loose ponytail, throws on a loose robe and pulls back the rice paper walls of her room. The bite of cold air hits the sheen of sweat on her skin and Gandy shivers. On weak-kneed limbs, Gandy shakes off the remnants of the familiar nightmare to enter her neighbor's building where steam from freshly brewed tea curled curiously through the air. She is lucky to find her older companion awake so late at night. Gandy had undone her hair and it cascaded and dripped over her shoulders, something liquid in its fluidity. Yamada-san was proper as ever, her legs tucked neatly underneath herself, and her hair tucked neatly into a bun as she gazed out past the sliding rice paper walls and into the dark of the night.

Past customary greetings and under the weight of the silent heavy air Yamada-san spoke,

“There is a story that might interest you. I have held it back since this is not hearsay but something very real which I myself witnessed. When I was younger even than you, there was a sorcerer well-known throughout the province for his knowledge and his treachery. This was a double-edged sword, for many would seek him out for his help, yet find themselves indebted to him in devastating ways. I knew a woman who did so.”

“She was called Fujioko-san and her beauty was indescribable, and as such, she had many suitors. But she was a kind and gentle woman, and some of her suitors not so. One in particular, Gatou-san had wealth and brutality at his side. He threatened her village, and he threatened her family. Fujioko-san would have done anything for her family, but she could not bear to marry Gatou-san.”

“Instead, she sought out the help of the sorcerer,” Yamada-san paused thoughtfully, “I do not know his name, only that Fujioko-san called him uncle, though I knew both her parents had no siblings.”

“When Fujioko-san returned from visiting the sorcerer she had aged twenty years. No longer a beauty, Gatou-san rescinded his threats and Fujioko-san lived a peaceful if not shorter life. The story told in my village is that Fujioko-san traded her beauty to the sorcerer in exchange for freedom, but Fujioko-san lived near me, and as a curious child I once asked her to tell the story to me herself.”

Yamada-san paused and looked into Gandy’s eyes. Her gaze was assessing, but she seemed to find what she was looking for as she soon continued on with the story.

“Fujioko-san told me that the sorcerer had asked her not for her beauty, but for years of her life and a piece of her soul.”

Gandy leaned forward across the table her hair falling forward and her eyes wide and fixed on the older woman.

“He dealt in time and souls? What happened to him?”

Yamada-san lifted an eyebrow at Gandy’s interest. “At one point I know a powerful priestess confronted him, after which no one spoke of deals with the sorcerer again.” 

Gandy leaned back, pensive, as she muttered under her breath, “Maybe the priestess who fought him? But she must be long dead… her sect then?”

She lifted her head to look at Yamada-san again, “Where did the priestess come from?”

“Kyouto” the older woman replied a frown creasing her forehead.

“To the west then,” Gandy smiled but her lips were pulled tight and her eyes were serious, “how ironic.”

Yamada-san reached forward with her wrinkled hands, swollen with arthritis, “But that’s quite a journey, it would take you at least a week to get there.”

Gandy stood, avoiding the reach of her friend. There was something determined in her posture and the way her hakama whirled around her at the motion.  “Thank you Yamada-san,” she bowed the way the woman had taught her, “but this is what I came for Japan for, and it has taken me years to come this far, weeks are meaningless in the face of what I have endured.”

She left Yamada-san sitting at the table with two half-full cups of tea and a feeling of dread not even the peaceful moonlight could shake.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was created as part of The Adventure Bang 2018, check out the awesome artwork created for this story [here](http://louviart.tumblr.com/post/179525438133/my-work-for-theadventurebang-its-for-the) by the amazingly talented Levi. Also be sure to check out the other works created for this event!


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